What Keeps Conveyor Guys Up at Night?
In the 2005 Malcom Gladwell book, Blink, there is a great paragraph on marketing and packaging:
there’s the issue of what is called sensation transference. This is a concept coined by one of the great figures in twentieth-century marketing, a man called Louis Cheskin, who was born in Ukraine at the turn of the century and immigrated to the United States as a child. Cheskin was convinced that when people give an assessment of something they might buy in a supermarket or a department store, without realizing it, they transfer sensations or impressions that they have about the packaging of the product to the product itself. To put it another way, Cheskin believed that most of us don’t make a distinction — on an unconscious level — between the package and the product. The product is the package and the product combined.
Liquor containers tend to be extreme
There has always been a fun battle between the marketing and production side of packaging. The Marketing Department comes up with a beautifullly unique, oddly shaped, off center bottle that enhances and improves the sensation transference while the Production Department has to produce the product efficiently enough so that the price point can be optimized. There are many things that can affect a bottle’s ability to be efficiently produced, such as the center of gravity, material type, side contour, contact surfaces, etc. My experience is solidly on the production side of packaging, and that’s why posts like this on the amazing packaging design blog, TheDieline, give me nightmares.
50 Favorite Liquor Package Designs
It also keep us in business.
Tags: blink, conveyor, gladwell, liquor, marketing, packaging, production